Night Shift with “The Clock”

Yes, I have seen all twenty-four hours of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”—the perpetually churning video collage, in which thousands of movie clips have been arranged so that they correspond with the actual time of day. I did not attempt to plow through the video in one sitting; it’s art, not an endurance contest. Rather, I let “The Clock” wash over me in dreamy, overlapping waves: three hours here, four hours there. Though Marclay’s montage is fun to watch, what I relished most was entering and exiting the gallery where it was showing. As gifted as Marclay is in joining cinematic fragments together, his greatest editing feat lies in creating a seamless transition between reality and fantasy—when it’s 11:24 P.M. off-screen, it’s 11:24 P.M. onscreen. Sliding into the slipstream of “The Clock” is the closest I’ve come to replicating those uncanny moments, in Haruki Murakami’s novels, when characters cross over into a parallel universe: “the other side.” This surreal feeling may well have been heightened by the fact that I watched so many hours of “The Clock” in Japan. (I wrote of this trip in my Profile of Marclay, which appeared in a recent issue of the magazine.)

The more of the “The Clock” I watched, the more pleasurable each new sequence became, as emerging patterns—recurring visuals, familiar actors—bound the work together, fusing memories with anticipation. As Nabokov says of novels, when watching “The Clock” you should notice and fondle details. Marclay’s video constantly exposes the artificiality of cinematic time, but I never felt this so acutely as when I realized why Harold Lloyd’s comic stunt in “Safety Last”—the one in which he clings to the hands of a clock at the top of a skyscraper—was destined to happen at 2:45 P.M. It’s the only time during the daylight hours when clock hands form a nearly horizontal line.

There’s no best time to watch “The Clock.” I recommend fitting the video into a busy day, so that it feels like the cinematic realm has bled into your waking life. (The video is currently being shown in Ottawa, and will screen Saturday, March 24th in Los Angeles; soon enough, it will return to New York.) Permit me to make one impractical suggestion. Try to catch “The Clock” between 10 P.M. and 7 A.M. The passing of midnight is a highlight, as you might expect. But keep watching. The video always engages your mind, but it also tugs on your body, especially after midnight. The longer you stay up—after Klute, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and dozens of other characters have gone to bed—the more giddy and delirious you feel, and you become one with the blearily agitated characters onscreen.

Just after twelve-thirty, John Turturro, as the neurotic Barton Fink, begins pacing around his writer’s garret. Twenty minutes after one, Turturro is onscreen again, this time with Rosanna Arquette, gulping down coffee and Coke. Helena Bonham Carter, in “Fight Club,” delivers one of the many lines in “The Clock” that feel weirdly apt: “You’re gonna have to keep me up all night long.” You squirm in your seat just after two, when there’s an extended riff on snoring. Things turn scary: Vincent Price delivers ghoulish speeches, and we hear the mantra of hockey-masked Jason: “Kill, kill, kill.” As with all horror movies, there’s a sprinkling of sex. A young Johnny Depp is being kept awake, in “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” by the sound of pounding intercourse on the other side of his bedroom wall; he utters what could be the video’s credo: “Reality sucks.” Marclay edits the sequence so that it appears the moaning lovers are the lustrously sweaty Kathleen Turner and William Hurt, in “Body Heat.”

When your brain is really feeling fried, dream sequences take over. Kevin Spacey gazes up at the ceiling, where Mena Suvari is floating amid rose petals. Shortly after two-thirty, the Salvador Dalí nightmare from “Spellbound” is cleverly paired with another Hitchcock clip: Jimmy Stewart, who rouses himself after dozing in front of his rear window. The funniest take on sleeplessness belongs to Buñuel. To great effect, Marclay spreads out a sequence from “Phantom of Liberty”: just after one, the husband, struggling with insomnia, sees a cockerel walk into his bedroom. Three hours later, a giant emu waltzes in.

Watching “The Clock” at these obscure hours might also turn you into a feminist film critic. In the movies, men have plenty of adventures in the dead of night: Jason Statham goes on a stakeout, Steve McQueen prowls through tunnels, the gang from “Rififi” pulls off its heist, and the gang from “Scarface” stays up laundering money. But Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, and Sharon Stone have little to do but toss in their sheets.

I experienced the wee hours of “The Clock” in Boston, where it was recently shown at the Museum of Fine Arts. Around a quarter to three, my eyes were narrowing with fatigue when I heard a piercing sound that I realized I had been anticipating for hours: György Ligeti’s stabbing piano tones, used so effectively by Stanley Kubrick, in “Eyes Wide Shut,” to heighten the eeriness of Tom Cruise’s late-night wanderings. I stayed in the gallery until sunrise, but if I were to explore the dark side of “The Clock” again, I might leave the gallery the second I heard Ligeti’s shivery music. I’d slip from the black theatre into the black night, the score still haunting my ears, and focus on the sound of my heels clicking on the sidewalk. For a delicious moment or two, I wouldn’t be me—I’d be a figment of Kubrick’s imagination.

Photograph courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, NY.

Daniel Zalewski is the magazine’s features director. He has
contributed profiles of Werner Herzog, Ian McEwan, and others.